When performed on my current system, things looked promising briefly. But then (perhaps after a power-cycle?) running bluetoothctl, it would respond with 'waiting to connect to bluetoothd' and then immediately overwrite that message with the '[bluetooth] #' prompt. 'sudo bluetoothctl' seemed to work, but I couldn't connect to the speaker that was previously working. I tried to remove BlueZ and install again, but that left the system unable to see the adapter (hci0).

So, I imaged a new card with the 2017-08-16-raspbian-stretch image. I again did a

and reboot, and this time, from the start, bluetoothctl is responding again with 'waiting to connect to bluetoothd' again overwritten by the bluetoothctl prompt. 'sudo bluetoothctl' appears to work normally. The adapter is up, and bluetoothd seems to be running normally.

Well the first link is about audio streaming (not necessarily PulseAudio, which is no longer used.) But yes, I wanted to test the new Bluetooth patches that jamesh announced. No luck. The problem I experienced was strictly with bluetoothctl, and seemingly only when run under the 'pi' user.

I'll try to test with a later version of Raspbian today, in between scary movies.

Well the first link is about audio streaming (not necessarily PulseAudio, which is no longer used.) But yes, I wanted to test the new Bluetooth patches that jamesh announced. No luck. The problem I experienced was strictly with bluetoothctl, and seemingly only when run under the 'pi' user.

I'll try to test with a later version of Raspbian today, in between scary movies.

A few of us have tried to reproduce the problem at the office and haven't been able to. If you manage it again, it would be nice to know the exact steps required.

Ok, that explains some of my results (I forgot about the bdaddr changes.) Still doesn't explain my 'waiting to connect to bluetoothd' error when using bluetoothctl as pi, but not under sudo. I'm burning the latest image now, and will continue my testing.

I was not able to reproduce my previous problems, with the latest Raspbian. I'll keep looking into it. Meanwhile, the new Bluetooth code looks promising. I'm currently streaming from an internet radio station over Wi-Fi and broadcasting it to a Bluetooth speaker. In almost an hour, no stoppages, and a minimal amount of glitching, which could be attributed to the server, my shoddy network, or Bluetooth in general.